[DJ_Izumi]

Hmm, let me have a play with it, using your above data, when I get back home in a couple of hours.

No offense, but isn't that kinda the whole point of an NFO file?  That it has all necessary information?  I should be able to provide Kodi with cheesesandwich.mkv and so long as cheesesandwich.nfo contained all info, title, episode, season, synopsis, and all of that, then cheesesandwich.mkv has no problem being Futurama, Season 1, Episode 5, 'Fear of a Bot Planet', inside Kodi.  That's how I always understood it and that's how it appears to be working.  Unless Kodi is instead given 'cheesesandwich e11.mkv', now it ignores the matching NFO file's episode and season number and makes it Season 1 Episode 11.

[DJ_Izumi]

I'm guessing it has something to do with that new date numbering.
The date is found in your file and recognised, then those tags are read. I wonder.
Can't seem to find the PR for it at this moment.

You may be right here, because I just tested my own statement and renamed a set of these files from their original names and to cheesesandwich.mkv, cheesesandwich.nfo and cheesesandwich.jpg and that doesn't scrap at all.  Scan To Library flat out fails here.

...God damn, did I come in, thinking Kodi worked one way, that mostly worked for my purposes, but it's not actually supposed to work that way at all, and the fact that it 'mostly works' as I thought, in my specific scenario, was actually a bug?

[Karellen]

You need to rethink. I know why you think the nfo is the master of all when it exists. But for episodes, it is not the case. Never has been.
Kodi needs to identify the episodes first. That is done by the filename numbering. Then the matching nfo file is used for metadata but not for season and episode numbering.
It has always been like that.
But the new date numbering, recently added, seems to do something slightly different. At a guess it needs to, because how can Kodi extract a season and episode number out of 2024-04-29. It can't.
I am not sure what bug you are referring to?

[DJ_Izumi]

You need to rethink. I know why you think the nfo is the master of all when it exists. But for episodes, it is not the case. Never has been.
Kodi needs to identify the episodes first. That is done by the filename numbering. Then the matching nfo file is used for metadata but not for season and episode numbering.
It has always been like that.
But the new date numbering, recently added, seems to do something slightly different. At a guess it needs to, because how can Kodi extract a season and episode number out of 2024-04-29. It can't.
I am not sure what bug you are referring to?

To be fair, I've never really needed to create many NFO files in using Kodi.  Almost everything just needed correct numbering and relied on the the scraper and what's in TVDB to get the necessary info correctly into the database.  I've only done 2-3 series myself, generating an NFO file from scratch for things that were not in the TVDB.  In those cases I followed standard file naming conventions.

This is a new case, where I'm testing out 'TubeSync' to download and produce NFO files for YouTube channels, that are not indexed on TVDB (Which is most YT channels really) to allow me to enter them into my Kodi library and thus be easily accessed offline and archived.  TubeSync doesn't appear to be able to quite generate the file names Kodi needs, but the Nfo files and this bug in using them when the episode numbering is a calandar date, make it 'work, mostly'.  I guess the real root is to raise the issue with the TubeSync dev to see if it can be improved to produce file names more complaint with Kodi.

I just find it rather funny that what I have 'mostly working' shouldn't work at all, and that it does work is some kind of bug or accident.